I wrote six iPhone applications that were released to the AppStore between 2009 and 2010. Five of the six apps have had very limited monetary success (maximum $200/year in revenue). However, my Group Texting Pro app was very successful, at least by my personal measurements. Since the June 2010 release, it has netted me well over $10,000 after Apple’s cut — not ridiculously successful, but certainly not bad for a side project! This is my reflection on building the Group Texting Pro app, including what I think made it successful, and what I could have done better.

App Ideation

In the summer of 2010, iOS4 was announced. iOS4 had a huge amount of new APIs available to developers (over 1500 according to the product announcement). I was very interested to find a ‘niche’ application that used one of the new APIs and solved a very specific problem, although I didn’t have a problem in mind. I read the API documentation, and was immediately drawn to the SMS/MMS API. There had been no way to interface with the SMS capabilities in an app before iOS4. Since almost everyone sends text messages, I decided building an application that sent text messages was a good starting plan. I began brainstorming pain-points around text messaging. One specific pain came to mind: There was a group of ~10 friends that I sent the same message to pretty much every Friday night: ‘Doing anything tonight?’ Sending this text message required numerous steps as follows:

Native steps to send a Group Message

Open the Messages app

Remember names of people you want to message

Type in names

Who am I missing? Thinking…. Add the missing people.

Type in a message, and send

I wanted to turn this into:

Open my Group Texting app

Click a group

Type in a message, and send

The basic concept was born. Here is why I think Group Texting Pro was successful:

Release Timing -
iOS4 was scheduled to be released on June 21, 2010. I had one primary goal: Be the first group texting application in the AppStore. I was certain that if I was to be the first, my application needed to be available on June 21, 2010. I had my deadline, so then it was just a matter of hitting it. It is hard to find free cycles to complete personal work, particularly with a short deadline and a spouse that you care deeply about. My wife happened to be in China for 3 weeks leading up to June 21 for business school. Problem solved - With Mary away, it was now socially acceptable for me to go on a 24 hour coding binge (Love you honey!). I ended up only needing about 12 of those hours to get the app done. Group Texting Pro was released on June 21, 2010 — of course, there were tens of other group texting apps in the store on the same day, but that is outside of my control. Being among the first definitely helped my app be successful.

Application Naming -
I was really bummed to find out that the ‘Group Texting’ name was already taken in the AppStore. It was the simplest, most descriptive name for what I built. What was I going to do? You always see the knock-off apps using names like ‘Best X’ or ‘New X’ — did I want my app to be ‘Best Group Texting’? Nope, that sounds lame. What to do? Screw it, I’ll name my app Group Texting Pro. Adding ‘Pro’ to the end of an app name is normally a developer’s mechanism to indicate a premium version of his or her existing app (e.g. a premium version of an app called Group Texting). I decided to change the rules. Even though I didn’t make Group Texting, I made Group Texting Pro. I honestly believe having the word ‘Pro’ in my app’s name made a difference in terms of who bought it and what price they were willing to pay.

Pricing (not at 99 cents) -
I initially priced Group Texting Pro at 99 cents. I was thrilled to see 10-20 downloads a day! Then after several weeks, I became bored and decided to experiment. I increased the price to $1.99. What happened? Downloads decreased a bit, but not substantially, and certainly not the 50% which would have caused the pricing change to be a mistake. I don’t have numbers for this, but I think it was approximately a 20% decrease. I let it ride for a few months, came home on a Friday night after a few beers, and said what the heck, lets bump it up to $2.99. What happened? Again, not much. Definitely a decrease, but the additional 70 cents per download in revenue easily offset the decrease. Also, the ratings definitely were better (more 5 star ratings). I think when people buy something for 3 bucks, they expect it to be good, and this affects their rating (they want to rate it highly because they paid more for it). In case you’re wondering, I have yet to consume enough beers on a Friday night to bump the price to $3.99

Review popup after minimal usage asking for 5 stars -
No shame here — I added a popup to my application after just a few uses that asks the customer to add a review in the AppStore. This seems to be working well. There are 238 reviews in the AppStore to date, with an average of 4.5 stars. There are only a handful of reviews that are 3 stars and under. Also, whenever someone emails me for support, I make sure to be very polite / responsive. If the support transaction goes well, I will ask them for an AppStore review. It’s actually quite amazing how grateful, polite, and thankful people are when asking me for support — they truly appreciate what I built, and are willing to let me know. That has been one of the best parts of this all (read some of my AppStore reviews, you’ll see what I mean).

Remove all possible customer decision points. Just do one thing -
I wanted Group Texting Pro to be dead simple. I didn’t want my customers to think about how they use it. Whenever there was a possible customer choice, I tried to eliminate it and just go with a reasonable default. For example, when my app sends a text message, it has to choose a phone number for each contact. If the contact has multiple numbers, it has to choose one of them. 95% of the time, your contacts will only have one number. Did I want to add a decision point for the 5% case that would have affected all of my customers? Nope, I just always chose the contact’s mobile number (there’s not even a choice to pick another number). Is this annoying? Certainly to some people — I’ve had plenty of people email me asking why they couldn’t choose another number for the contact (e.g the business number). But for 95% of people, it’s fine, they wont even notice — and I eliminated a decision point for them. I used this thought process for all decision points, and my competitors did not. Check the AppStore, you can configure most of the group texting apps halfway to Sunday. Some people want that, but for those who do not, they get value out of my app.

Not updating the app (and keeping the 4.5+ star ratings average) -
This was a tough one. There were definitely times when I wanted to update the app, make it a little cleaner, faster — tweak little things. But I didn’t because I wanted to maintain my star ratings count on the main AppStore app page. When you release a new version of your app, you don’t lose your ratings, but they no longer show up on the main search page — you have to click into the app to see them. You are effectively starting from 0 stars on the main page every time you release. Are customers going to be more drawn to an app that ‘appears’ to have more stars than a related one? I think so. Once I crossed a certain star threshold, I decided it wasn’t worth it to update the app. Hasn’t killed me so far.

What I wished I would have done

There’s no doubt that Group Texting Pro has been a great success for me, but there are still some things I wished I had done:

Basic Marketing / Advertising -
I essentially did no marketing or advertising. The only thing I did was to search for ‘Group Texting iPhone’ on Google, and spam any blog posts, message boards, or forums I could find that asked about a group texting solution on iPhone. I became bored of that pretty quickly (plus it seemed like a shitty thing to do), so I only hit maybe 5 of them. Based on Google analytics I do still get hits from them though. I feel like a bit more effort on marketing and advertising could have gone a long way, and I could have picked up some additional skills. Lesson learned.

Made it look a ‘little’ better -
Check out my screenshots. My design sucks! I’m pretty sure I used the default font with highly variable font sizes, and I selected whichever blue I found on the color wheel that looked halfway decent. I even used neon green for the checkmarks, which goes perfectly with default blue. I could have used this opportunity as a petri dish to get a little better at design, but I didn’t. Lesson learned, it’s always good to push yourself a bit! For what its worth I did design the icon myself (but I did it in Microsoft Word - HA - this is not a joke)

Tried to add multiple revenue streams with similar apps -
I thought several times about making a similar app to Group Texting Pro with the same basic framework. For example, it would have been fairly easy to use the core code and build ‘Group Email Pro’ — it would have been a cheap experiment (e.g. a few hours of work), for a possible new revenue stream. I didn’t do this, and I should have. I guess there’s still time?

Final Thoughts

So that’s my story. Group Texting Pro was my sixth app that I built and released, and it was the first one to make any real money. It hasn’t been life-changing in terms of $$$ but it has been life-changing in terms of my mindset. It’s given me the confidence to know that I can build something. As a Software Engineer, I have the means and skills to control my own destiny — not a lot of people can say this about their skill-set, and I am grateful for this. It is really fun to know that thousands of people use something I built every day, and they paid me for it, and are getting tremendous value out of it too. The thrill of opening itunesconnect every day is still there, 2 years later, and I hope that I can inspire you to attempt to get that same thrill. With that, I’ll leave you with a graph that I am very proud of, and a few of the many customer reviews that have made me smile through the experience:

You may be wondering, why the quick downward slope on the $$$ graph in the last 2 months. That’s the subject of another post, which I intend to write soon, stay tuned!

Some Quotes from Customers

I run a business with 9 employees, this app has completely changed the way I communicate with my employees. It’s mostly done in the evening. I can let them all know what everyone is doing the next day in one group text. It REALLY works well for me.

In the 15 years I coached this is the best way to communicate with players and parents…One text 26 people!!! Before it was 23 calls.

I am baseball coach and use this app to communicate too my team about rain outs, changes to practice times, remind them about other baseball related items. It has already paid for itself.

Incredible app. I use it to stay in touch with my teams….It has been a blessing for us.

Thanks so much, Matt. You are remarkable with your customer service, and I appreciate it–again!